TLDR : Use social media carefully, and drop it if not useful

There has been a recent tech-backlash by people in the industry. Issues to do with attention manipulation, the advertising model and ’the race to the bottom of the brainstem’ led by prominent technologists such as Tristan Harris

A summary of the literature :

• Social media is designed to deliberately maximise time on site and be addictive. You have top level psychologists working at these companies to ensure this. Examples : Youtube ‘watch next’, Facebook’s colour scheme, Pull to refresh, Snapchats’ stories features. This is discussed in several books.
• Several studies are being released correlating excessive social media use with mental health issues.
• The explosion of fake news. The word of 2018 was ‘fake news’
• Algorithmic selection of data resulting in echo chambers and promotion of confirmation bias
• Algorithmic selection of posts to promote outrage rather than nuanced discussion
• Outbreaks of violence driven by false information
• Advertising model misaligning incentives

You basically have an algorithmic supercomputer pointed at your brain trying to get you to maximise time on site

Social media is getting a beating. But I think it is here to stay.

I want to explore if there is a way to use social media effectively. The internet and technology has democratised the tools of distribution. You can literally write code, write thought, create content without going through an intermediary. I think this is a net positive. But as with any new technology, there are growing pains.

These are just a set of rules and thoughts about using social media sensibly.

1. Understand that Nuance is Lost :

Use social media to link to longer form content, videos and discussions The click bait, 280 character, medium can only convey so much information. It is prone to misintereptation. People posting opinions without any real discussion. Just broadcasting a particular viewpoint.

This just leads to shouting without any real discussion. The solution is instead to use it to maximise serendipity by linking to external content.

Content like blogs, videos, essays etc.

On the internet, there are some incredibly smart people making content. Some of the best educational resources are on YouTube. The library of Alexandria is at your finger tips, it’s just lost in a sea of noise. It’s like we are living in Borge’s infinite library on the internet. We just need to separate the signal from the noise.

2.Careful of Who You Follow

You are the average of the 5 people you associate with most. Most of your views actually come from people to follow and admire. Either consciously or unconsciously you select pieces of information and choose to believe it rather than reasoning from first principles.

This is adaptive. If you were to reason everything from first principles you simply would not have enough time. For example, with the Big Bang, I take that as a given theory because I respect the work physicists do. But I couldn’t explain it from first principles. A lot of my beliefs I just take at face value.

So knowing this, who you choose to listen to is of paramount importance. You tend to simply adopt the values and habits of those around you. If you surround yourself with hard working people, it just ends up rubbing off on you.

I can’t tell you who to listen to. But always be skeptical, and where-ever you can, try reason from first principles.

3.Switch it off

Use tools like Screen-time to limit time on site. Deliberately make time to check it rather than impulse checking Apple is my favourite. To call me a fanboy is an understatement. Apple don’t make their money off time spent on their devices. They simply make money from selling devices. They have no incentive in the race for attention.

They’ve shown that they are thinking about these topics, with the release of tools like Screen time. You can limit the amount of time you spend on the sites, and you can schedule ‘downtime’ where you can’t access the app.

They have also made privacy a priority. For all these reasons, I’ve literally never owned an android phone. I went straight from flip phone to iPhone.

Regulate how much you spend on these sites. So many times, I’ve been lost in YouTube. I wake up and realise I’ve spent 3 hours watching funny cat videos. The algorithm plays me like a fiddle. Get some autonomy back, switch it off when you don’t want to be distracted.

4.Create rather than Consume

Use social media as a way to create and share rather than consume It’s really easy to consume content. Much harder to create it.

I think you learn a lot more from creating and doing rather than just reading or watching. If you want to learn how to code, go build something. If you want to learn how to take good photographs, start taking photos. If you want to learn how to make videos, go make a video. If you want to write, write something. Don’t just passively consume media.

One project of mine is to become a better writer, so I started this. I found I was just reading other people’s blogs or books. This is useful, but I learn infinitely more reasoning through topics myself, rather than just watching someone reason it through themselves.

Obviously you start off bad. But you learn through doing. For example :

Instead of using instagram to follow ‘influencers’ (only recently learnt that such a thing exists), you can post your own photos. I really admire Instagram and how they’ve democratised the art of photography. Anyone can take photos now, and post them. You can learn by doing.

5.Don’t trade the mind for the moment

Switch off or don’t look at your phone when talking in real life. You want to 100% be present I love computers. I pretty much spent my childhood on computers. But the computer didn’t follow me around in my pocket all day, providing limitless entertainment back then. It wasn’t a competition between engaging with reality and engaging with a computer.

When talking with someone, don’t look at your phone unless showing something etc. This is basic etiquette.

6.Use tech to educate, not distract

I can either pull out my phone and habitually look at Instagram or Facebook and mindlessly scroll.

Or I can habitually look at ‘Medium’ or the Kindle app, or Instapaper or certain subreddits, or insightful Twitter accounts, or listen to audiobooks or podcasts and watch educational YouTube videos

You can literally read the majority of written word, the stored collective wisdom of civilisations and generations on a black rectangle in your pocket. This is magic.

You can choose how to use tech. It is simply a tool.

Conclusion : Techno-optimistism

I think social media can be used more judiciously, as a way to follow people you really admire, and to keep in touch with friends and family.

The danger lies in not thinking about how you use a tool.

Hopefully I’ll rethink and revise some of my views on the topic in the future and update!

2021 Update : How and Why You’re Using Social media

Why (in order of importance)

• Incentive to create something
• Keep up to date with lives of those you interacts with IRL
• Para-socially follow creative individuals for inspiration
• Validation (some part must be acknowledged) – being seen

How

• Don’t have the app installed on phone
• When I want to make something, I open it and post
• Active use > Passive use

All of the below are extensively backed up with research and in the interest of getting across a message, I’ve omitted referencing.

This information is taken from a couple brilliant books I’ve read called ‘Make it Stick’ and ‘A Mind for Numbers’.

1) Retrieval

Re-reading is not learning. Re-making notes on a topic is not learning. Re-making mind maps by referring to your notes is notlearning. Highlighting your passages and reading them is not learning.

You learn by quizzing, by answering questions. Forcing yourself to actively engage your mind in trying to answer a solution. This feels hard. Learning is meant to feel hard. Rereading is easy. Rereading is a waste of time.

2) Spacing

Spacing is the opposite of ‘massed practice’ which is cramming.

Spacing instead involves doing questions, every day over a long period of time. This is called ‘spaced repetition’. Ignore your intuition- it tells you to keep going over an answer again and again till you are ‘fluent’. But that is a false sense of fluency. That information has gone into your short term memory only, and has not been consolidated into your long term memory. To get information into your long term memory, you need to revisit it in spaced intervals.

Anki is a great tool for this.

3) Interleaving

Interleaving is the concept of ‘mixing up your quizzing’. This means answering questions not in an obvious structured order. For example :

A baseball player practices by hitting 15 straight balls and then hitting 15 curve balls. He will do better at practice. But in the long run, he will not develop competency to hit a curve ball.

Another baseball player practices by setting the machine to randomly fire curve balls. He will do worse at practice. It will be more frustrating. But over the long run, he will learn more.

Mix up your questions sets. Don’t do them in a logical order. This is hard. It forces you to think, to strain. It will feel slow compared to ‘massed practice’. #

4) Elaboration

Elaboration is the concept of explaining concepts in your own words. See the ‘Feynman technique’.

This involves relating a concept to your own life outside of class, creating your own examples and metaphors.

For example, to explain angular momentum: an ice skater speeds up her rotation as she brings her arms closer to her body.

5) Generation

Generation is the concept of trying to answer a questionor solving a problem beforehand, instead of just reading the solution. Have a go at a question/problem, even if you get it wrong, as long as you get the solution you will remember it a lot better than just reading the solution. Studies even show that if you delay getting the solution (waiting for the answers till the end of a quiz) it will ingrain itself deeper into your mind.

6) Reflection

This involves ‘journalling’ on what you have learnt. Asking yourself questions such as :

What did I do wrong?’ What did I do right? How can I improve next time? For example : you might see a patient on ward rounds as a medical student. If working on your communication skills, write down your process. How could you frame a question in a simpler way? Are you speaking too fast or too slow?

7) Calibration

Calibration is aligning your view with objective reality. It is too easy to lie to yourself. You might read over some text, and say ‘yeh, I know this’. Or you might just skip a question saying ‘I definitely know this’. This is called the ‘Illusion of knowing’- where re-reading text gives you a false sense that you know some material.

To get rid of this bias, test yourself. Do quizzes, answer questions. Exams and test results are concrete measures. This keeps you tethered to reality.

If your grades are bad, this is another indication that you are doing something wrong. Don’t take it personally. Look at it objectively. Exams are there to be a compass; something you periodically check to see if you are moving in the right direction.

8) Mnemonic devices

This is obvious. We’ve all been taught this. But use it, it is powerful. One caveat is, these are used only for recall. Mnemonic devices are not a substitute for understanding aconcept. They are simply a tool to help recall information and organise it in your mind. A mental filing cabinet.

Examples :

ROYGBIV to remember the colours of the rainbow.

Mnemonic devices can also be visual. If you want to read more about this, see the loci method. This is visual mnemonic device that has been used for thousands of years to organise large amounts of information. It is a technique used by memory champions. I’ve used it to memorise a deck of cards. It works.

9) Focused vs Diffuse Thinking

This concept is more pertinent to solving problems and creativity rather than memorisation. There are two modes of thinking.

Focused thinking is where you are deeply concentrated on a problem. You’ve got the blinders on and are closed to other possibilities. You need this mode to get work done.

Diffuse thinking is thinking that happens subconsciously in the background. Where your mind is still working on a problem in the background. This often leads to those ‘aha’ moments either in the shower, or when taking a walk or exercising. It allows you to step back and find a new way of looking at a problem.

To optimise problem solving, you want to switch between the two modes. This means – work intensely on trying to solve a problem… then walk away. Literally go take a walk. Your subconscious will work on the problem.

Summary : Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much.

Over this past year, I’ve experimented with a vegan diet.

I actually started out knowing little about the ethical aspect of it. In fact I hopped on the bus for the purported health benefits. It was a useful experiment. I stuck to eating mainly vegetables, grains and beans for next 6 months (essentially a Mahastastran diet without dairy) and learnt how to cook decent vegetarian food.

But after a year, I’ve reassessed and am back to eating an omnivorous diet. Few reasons why.

1. Too easy to lose muscle mass/weight.

2. Certain micronutrients are missed out on a vegan diet. Especially omega’s in fish, but many more

3. Nutrition exhibits genetic variation. How you respond to certain macronutrient splits is dependent on your genetic profile e.g. insulin sensitivity, tendency to put on weight (FTO gene +ve in my case). I respond poorly to high carbohydrate diets which veganism tends to fall under.

4. Subjectively felt a lot better going back to eating fish

People get very dogmatic about veganism. That has also put me off. Especially in citing nutrition research.

The evidence behind some of the nutrition claims of the 21st century are hugely flawed. They are observational studies (very poor quality). The whole state of nutrition science is in fact terrible.

However one aspect, I cannot argue against is the ethical argument of veganism/vegetarianism.

Ethical Case for Veganism

It’s think that half a century into the future, mankind will look back with reproach at how animals were treated for consumption; factory farming en masse.

Fortunately, it’s likely in the future we will transition to GMO and organically grown meat rather than factory farmed methods. The fact is : that massive suffering and oppression of sentient beings is occurring globally.

Now diet is a sensitive issue for most. People often take a dogmatic approach siding with certain ‘camps’. “I’m vegan, all meat eaters are terrible people” or “vegans are just malnourished hipsters ” or “humans were meant to eat meat, you need the protein” etc. This sort of binary thinking is the wrong approach. “Only a Sith deals in absolutes” as Yoda would say.

I don’t think that the only way to be ‘ethical’ is to become a vegetarian or vegan.

It’s way too hard for the majority of the population. On a macro scale it probably won’t have the intended consequences Hypothetically if we cut meat consumption in half and sourced it from ethical methods, that is 10x better than even doubling or tripling the number of current vegetarians. Reduction rather than replacement. We can’t expect the 1.5 billion people in China entering the middle class to become vegans. They will eat meat.

Would you rather have 10,000 people opt for 50% of their current meat consumption and eat more vegetables- or 100 people switch to vegetarianism. The latter just doesn’t have enough of an impact.

Even if you do become vegetarian, you simply switch to eating eggs and it’s arguable that egg laying chickens are the worst treated of all animals. In terms of animal suffering, the solution isn’t always so clear. It’s true we can never have perfect knowledge about the consequences of our decisions.

Factory farming though should be phased out.

How do we change? Most people are following a processed meat, dairy, egg heavy diet rather than a strict paleo or a vegan diet. It’s not feasible that they will go from 0 – 100 and end up sticking with it. What instead needs to happen is that the needle needs to moved slowly in the right direction with our consumer purchases. ‘Vote with your wallet’. Buy ethically sourced goods.

‘But what effect can I have? You would be surprised by the first order effects of your consumer decisions. Companies are incentivised to provide for the consumer. ‘The consumer is always right’. It’s why you have more Walmart and fast food restaurants in economically deprived areas of the US instead of Whole foods. If instead those people went out and drove 20 minutes to buy ethically sourced products, companies will build stores closer to them.

‘Its too expensive’. If you’re in a 1st world country, buying vegetables isn’t too much more expensive. But I understand that for some, they won’t exactly be able to buy Waitrose organic salmon.

Health Benefits On the individual level, switching to mostly plant based foods is the rational thing to do for your health. The general public is inundated with media stories about fad diets, ‘eggs are good’ ‘eggs are bad’ ‘veganism is good’ ‘drink more red wine’. This is all often backed up with pseudoscience and poorly conducted studies. Even with well conducted studies. Do I need a double blind RCT with a placebo group that getting an oversized Russian olympic weightlifter to roundhouse kick me in the groin is going to cause damage. No.

Information overload is a problem especially in this day and age We know what is good : non factory farmed, ethically sourced products and plant based nutrition. Both morally and biologically. Diet is really the topic where the gap between ‘information’ and ‘action’ becomes so visible. We know but we don’t act. Instead the solution is to simplify. Replace ‘diet’ which implies weight loss for many with just ‘food’. Advise patients to eat food that they enjoy and is actually food.

I love Michael Pollans’ (author of the Omnivore’s dilemma) advice on this :

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants

Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food

Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting. Rather than adopting a certain diet, what we need to aim for is making the correct moral decision. Buy the responsibly sourced meat or eggs, eat mainly vegetables, eat meat only sometimes. Learn to cook with fresh ingredients rather than buying packaged goods. The change happens at the individual level with your wallet. As Agent K said in Men in Black ’A person is smart, people are dumb’.

What we eat will always be an issue close to my heart. In this age of overmedication (insert cholesterol lowering drug here) instead of addressing the root cause, doctors simply end up adding more fuel to the fire. As Hippocrates said ‘Let food be thy medicine’. Ultimately eating well has not only physical benefits, but also considerable moral, ethical and ecological (didn’t even cover) impacts. It all starts with the food on your plate.

Rereading in 2019

Sassy.

But pretty much agree with Michael Pollan : eat plants, eat reasonable amount of fish/meat, nuts/seeds. Paleo-like diet.

Wow. I quoted Agent K from Men in Black?! Nice past me. Also what is the analogy about a Russian Olympic weightlifter kicking you in the groin?!*